Reader, I
“Reader, I married him”—–yes, Corey Van Landingham did. Jane Eyre acknowledgements aside, looks to the heavens to help comprehend just what that makes her. As her sidekick, we’re in for a dazzling ride of allusion, wit, bawdiness, and joy. The author of two previous collections, Van Landingham earned Wallace Stegner and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and now teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.
Reader, I
studied sonnets on a chaise longue in Charleston. Each small
song clarified the couplet, the fevered rhetoric of two held
together, in the rental car, on the long drive south. Each day
we were more married, more varied in how we touched. It once
made me sad. That much would be lost, and soon—Nothing but
tenderness and pleasure, Samuel Johnson defined that first honeyed
month against the waning moon. On time, Shakespeare alacked
its wrackful siege. But dawn’s novel idiom arose brilliant from
the harbor. Highballs kept, somehow, the thinnest rime. We
shuttered the hotel windows, plotted years of humid mornings,
scones crumbling in our sheets. What else, reader, could we
script on the Chevy’s rear glass? What would seem just still,
returning, as we must, to the year, what would thrill him, might
remind that even a slim crescent dazzles the black ink of night?
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
